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To her children she is a “warrior,” to the court she is acquitted, and to world she is innocent, at last.

Shortly after Ontario’s Court of Appeal overturned a 25-year-old manslaughter conviction that was based on flawed evidence by disgraced pathologist Charles Smith, Maria Shepherd and her family and supporters stood on the stately steps of Osgoode Hall Monday, crying tears of joy and cheering.

As her husband, son and three daughters looked on, Shepherd held her father, Ramon Crespo, in a long embrace as the 82-year-old man wept.

“I’m finally acquitted and I’m free — and I can be a mom to my kids without this hanging over my head,” an emotional Shepherd said outside court Monday. “I’m extremely grateful.”

Under great duress, Shepherd, now 46, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the 1991 death of her 3-year-old stepdaughter, Kasandra — a toddler she was helping raise after marrying Kasandra’s father.

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The plea was made on the advice of her lawyer, who told Shepherd she stood little chance against the implicating evidence being provided by Smith, then considered the “best of the best.” She convicted in 1992 and sentenced to two years less a day at Milton’s Vanier Centre for Women.

Maria Shepherd, left, hugs her father Ramon Crespo on the steps of a Toronto court after it quashed her conviction of manslaughter on Monday. (Chris Young / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

But new evidence recently provided by a team of international forensic pathologists shows Smith’s incriminating opinion and testimony in Shepherd’s case was “fundamentally flawed,” according to the Crown.

The “linchpin” of the case — Smith’s opinion that Kasandra’s death was caused by a significant blow to the head by Shepherd — has now been “thoroughly discredited,” ruled Court of Appeal Justices David Watt, Gladys Pardu and Peter Lauwers. That renders Shepherd’s guilty plea void.

“There is no demonstrated nexus between Maria Shepherd’s conduct and her stepdaughter’s death,” Watt said, reading out the decision on behalf of the panel.

None of the experts could conclusively determine Kasandra’s cause of death, but said that it may have been the result of a natural disease, such as epilepsy, or an accidental fall. That uncertainty among the experts means the responsibility for Kasandra’s death “cannot be brought home to Maria Shepherd.”

“The appropriate penalty is an acquittal,” Watt said.

Jordan Carter, Maria’s eldest child, said his mother’s conviction has been an ordeal for the entire family.

“We’ve struggled and we’ve suffered for a very long time for something that should have never happened to us,” he said outside court.

But it didn’t break them, said Natasha Shepherd, one of Maria’s three daughters, who calls her mother a “warrior.”

“It made us stronger. And it all gave us a backbone that we didn’t know that we had, and we pushed through.”

Once a revered forensic pathologist, Smith’s work came under increasing scrutiny beginning in 2005, when first a review, then a public inquiry, revealed Smith had made egregious errors in 20 child death cases, including Kasandra’s. He has since been stripped of his medical licence.

Shepherd’s case is the eighth Smith-involved conviction overturned through advocacy from the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC). Outside court, James Lockyer, AIDWYC’s founding director and Shepherd’s lawyer, said the association is still working toward acquittals in at least two other Smith-related convictions.

“We’re not finished yet,” he said. “I think, yes, we will be back here in the near future.”

Asked why Shepherd’s case took so long to work its way through the court system, Lockyer said wrongful conviction cases are especially difficult to take on. They are time-consuming, expensive, and AIDWYC’s limited resources mean the group can usually only handle one or two such cases at a time.

“The system tends to fight you all the way,” Lockyer said. “Eventually they didn’t, and that’s a relief and very much to the credit of the Attorney General’s Office. But it took us a long time to get there.”

Shepherd said she has chosen to forgive Smith. Freeing herself of the weight of her anger towards him will allow her and her family to move on, she said.

But the acquittal does not erase the pain of her wrongful conviction, and it won’t bring back the toddler the family lost. “We miss Kasandra very, very much,” Shepherd said.

Ashley Shepherd, Kasandra’s father and Maria’s husband of 26 years, said the exoneration clears away the cloud hanging over the family. But he will always wonder what could have happened if Kasandra’s health problems had been diagnosed.

“I believe that if they had found what was actually wrong with her, she would have been alive today,” he said. “She’d be 28 years old.”

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